Kiwi households spend an astounding 16,810 hours cleaning

Media Release7 November 2012Kiwi households spend an astounding
16,810 hours cleaning with Home Heroes
challengeOver a six-week
period 1,161 Kiwi families clocked up an astounding 16,810
hours of cleaning, the equivalent of just over 700 days or
23 months, as part of the first ever Home Heroes online
challenge.

Home Heroes, an online game conducted by
Reckitt Benckiser, makers of Dettol, Finish, Harpic, Vanish
and BAM, helps transform cleaning from a daily chore into a
fun competition for the whole family. Families battled it
out against each other by completing a number of cleaning
challenges in a quest to become the top cleaner in their
household.

In a survey* conducted prior to the
challenge, more than 57 per cent of parents were desperate
to enlist help when it came to the household chores and 26
per cent believed their children were the main hindrance
when it came to getting the cleaning done.

The Home
Heroes game aimed to deal with this issue by encouraging
kids to carry out household chores by giving them points and
prizes when they completed their set tasks. An online leader
board allowed players to measure their results and progress
against other members of the family, friends and
neighbours.

“Home Heroes has been a huge success
in its first year and the feedback we’ve received from
families across the country so far has been fantastic,”
says Reckitt Benckiser New Zealand Marketing Director, Joerg
Stockburger.

“The programme has definitely
appealed to the competitive nature of Kiwis, and
particularly that of the family unit, where bragging rights
are a strong motivation. Many participants found that the
kids were too busy trying to collect points to even realise
they were helping with the chores,” he adds.

Rachel Goodchild, a leading parenting and education
coach, enjoyed putting her own children to the Home Heroes
test. "I’m a big believer in getting children to work
around the house, in part to keep me sane as a working
mother but also because I'm all about raising children into
adults who can look after themselves. Every dish washed and
every table wiped is one step closer to them becoming an
adult I know will cope well when they leave home. The best
thing of all is it also helps us as a family to see cleaning
is a shared responsibility,” she says.

Tasks cited by
participants as the most popular included carpet cleaning
and cleaning the cat and dog bowl. Surprisingly cleaning the
bathroom also came out as one of the more popular tasks,
although cleaning the toilet was among the least
favourite.

“We recognise that cleaning is considered a
burden in many households and most would prefer to be
spending time on something else. This programme reinforces
the notion of ‘many hands make light work’ to encourage
the sharing of chores amongst all family members, in order
to give parents back more time for the important things in
life,” adds Stockburger.

Reckitt Benckiser hopes
that Home Heroes has helped to create more long-term
positive habits when it comes to distributing chores fairly
amongst members of the household and we encourage families
to keep up the good work.

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